E3 2011: Colour us surprised - the Elite service for Call of Duty looks really good! Modern Warfare 3, on the other hand... not so surprising.
Activision’s booth turned out to be bit of a surprise. If you’ve been paying attention, you might know that we’re a little… down on Call of Duty. Sure, the company has other properties, and we saw them, but really the heart of the Activision E3 presence was Modern Warfare 3. And you know what… it’s not as bad as we thought.
And, even more surprisingly, we really liked Call of Duty: Elite. Yes, the world ends now. But first…
Prototype 2 We played a lot of Prototype. It was fun, dark, had an interesting hero and a lot of awesome powers to play with in a wide open world under threat from an out of control biological infection. And, you got to toss around cars. At helicopters. We considered that worth the price of admission right there, and even Dave Frachia, from Radical –who talked us through the Prototype2 demo – brought up that very Penny Arcade comic.
So how is the sequel flavoured? Well, think more. More gore, more powers, more mutations. “We were able to look at all the feedback,” Frachia told us, “all the reviews, and then used a lot of that to help shape the direction of Prototype2.”
Thing is, though, it did look like a lot of the same. And the thing that stopped us playing the original was just that.
What is different is the player – you take on the role of one Sgt. Heller, freshly returned from the frontlines, and hot on the revenge-trail following the death of his family. Frachia made a big point about how his attitude – which is pretty much kill ‘em all, the end justifies the means – and his complete memory makes the game experience very different.
There are a lot of new powers, and the enemy has been heavily tweaked. It’s certainly looking good, with a whole new rendering engine, and yeah, there is still an undeniable thrill to ripping the missile mount off a tank and then using it against that… same… tank. It’s called ‘weaponising’ in Prototype2, and you can apparently do it to anything that has, well, a weapon on it.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Yeah, we got to see the juggernaut that is MW3, and… well, look, the CoD fans that have made Activision billions of dollars and worn out countless cuss words in endless online matches will lap it up.
But, it must be said, it does look like it will provide an epic level of action. More then one person who saw the demo felt it was very much from the Michael Bay school of story design. Explosions, things falling down, very serious men doing serious things, then… some more explosions.
The Hunter-Killer mission, where you have to stealthily navigate a flooded road tunnel using one-man submersibles, on the way to intercept a Russian submarine is a perfect example. It could almost be a scientific-grade experiment in ratcheting up the action factor. You force the sub to breach with a limpet charge, board it – which is actually a pretty cool concept – and then fight through the boat to its control room. Here we get to see the first real new gameplay element, where blasting open the door drops the game into an intense and very cinematic slow-mo. Watching the hatch door slowly tumble through the cabin, and all the Russian crew react, is pretty neat.
We blogged this demo, but the second is just as crazy. In it, you’re part of a SAS team doing… well, we’re not sure. They start out trying to stop a vanload of something leave, and then it’s an all out firefight on the London streets, complete with chopper support. It’s fast and frenetic, and surprisingly unscripted – our demo guy actually got nailed three times, and that never happens in these demo sessions.
The level ends with the most over the top chase. You and your team on borrowed pickups, chasing the remaining terrorists (or glee-clubbers, ACL members, or whatever) as they escape on a speeding underground train.
It’s big, dumb and loud action, but damn me if Infinity Ward can’t do it well.
Call of Duty: Elite Here’s the big surprise – we really like the look of this service.
Yeah, I know, we bagged it out when it was announced, along with most every other game journo, but our demo of it changed our minds.
The two Treyarch dudes who demoed it, Noah Heller and Jay Puryear, made a big point of how free the game is. You join up for free, use all the features for free. In fact, one of my scrawled notes for the session was “Saying free a lot. Free-free. Free.”
Kinda sums it up. The premium level of the service simple adds on a few more features to already existing ones, and everything we saw demoed was the free stuff. And it’s a lot.
From engagement ranges, to linger times, to heat maps of commonly played levels to show where you’re fighting – or dying – the most, it’s an insane level of detail. We can in fact now believe the claims that this service does improve your playing.
Even better, we were told that the Elite team has used a lot of financial-based systems to learn how to display and compare such often complex data. And it’s all-cross linkable between friends, so you can compare stats, and even set up groups based on similar likes, such as AtomicFans. On top that, there will also be some stupidly robust clan systems implemented.
We gotta say it – we were wrong. We’d gladly use this service.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012